Gordon, Gary D., October 31, 2010 [Interview]

Oral History Collection
To read the transcript and listen to the audio of this interview at the same time, first download
the pdf of the transcript by clicking on the link at the top of this screen. The
transcript will open in a separate window. Next, select the option to the right of the
screen.
Special Collections
Musselman Library
Interview with
Gary D. Gordon
Interviewer: Teddy Smith
Interview Date: October 31, 2010
0
The Oral History of Dr.
Gary D. Gordon: Life
Leading up to and
Including World War Two
Interview conducted by Teddy Smith
History 300
Professor Birkner
11/2/2010
1
[The Date is October 31, 2010 and I have driven from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to Gaithersburg,
Maryland to interview Dr. Gary Gordon in his home located at 400 Center Street, PO Box 125
Washington Grove, Maryland 20880. The interview concerns his life from birth and earliest memories of
World War II and beyond.]
Teddy Smith: So we are sitting here with Mr. Gary D. Gordon who was born in 1928. So Mr. Gordon,
where and when was the exact date of your birth?
Dr. Gary D. Gordon: I was born in Elkins, West Virginia. My parents were on furlough and then when I
was about a year old they went to Brazil as medical missionaries and they landed in Brazil for the first
time in 1929.
Smith: What were your parents names?
Gordon: My father was Dr. Donald C. Gordon and my mother was Helen Gary Gordon.
Smith: They were medical missionaries. Were they both medical doctors?
Gordon: My father was a surgeon.
Smith: And what did your mother do?
Gordon: Well, she was mainly a house wife and helped my father in many ways and she had been a
missionary teacher before but when she got to Rio Verde. My father needed someone to administer the
anesthesia so she would administer the anesthesia. When he needed someone to teach the nurses, she
would teach the nurses. She had a textbook and just stayed a chapter ahead of them. When they needed a
director of the nursing school, she became the director of the nursing school. And then later in her career
she learned how to give injections.
[Laughs]
Smith: So she kind of just learned as she went?
Gordon: On the job.
[Laughs]
Smith: What inspired them to move their family to Brazil?
2
Gordon: Well, my father decided to be a missionary and he decided that he didn’t have the speaking
ability to be a pastor so he went into medicine and in college he had decided to go to medical missionary
to China. They were quite a few medical missionaries going to China in those days and I’m so glad that
he didn’t. My mother had been a missionary teacher in Bolivia and Chile a year in each under the
Methodist board and he proposed to her when she was in Chile by letter and she accepted by cable.
[Laughs] But she convinced him to talk to the Methodist board and they sent them to Peru so they started
to learn Spanish for three years. In Peru he was working as a surgeon in a large city hospital and he had
the pioneer spirit. He wanted to start a hospital where there wasn’t any hospital and the Methodist board
didn’t have anything like that so they went to the Presbyterians. The Presbyterians sent them to Brazil in
1929. When I was about two or three years old the first place they were at they were just learning the
language and he had to get his medical diploma revalidated but one of my earliest recollections was a
Zeppelin going across our back yard once a week. Germany had actually a weekly service from Germany
to Brazil.
Smith: And this was around what year?
Gordon: Early 1930s. Yes, this was before the Hindenburg caught fire which kind of put the kibosh on
the use of Zeppelins.
Smith: Did you have any siblings that were with you?
Gordon: Yes, I have an older sister named Hope and a younger brother named Alan and a younger sister
named Alma. Hope married a Brazilian pastor and stayed in Brazil all her life. She is still living there. My
brother Alan became a missionary like our father. He went back to Brazil and my sister Alma married a
pastor who was a missionary in Africa.
Smith: Seemed like everyone sort of stayed in the family business then. So your family stayed in Brazil
until 1943?
Gordon: Well I only stayed in Brazil until 1943. My parents stayed a lot later. When I was about fifteen,
I came to college in the states.
3
Smith: So what was life as a child like in Brazil? What sort of stuff did you do? What was school life
like?
Gordon: Well, I remember a very little bit about Bayer and then we went to Budi Chi. My father spent
about a year sort of exploring the interior of Brazil in order to pick the right town to start a hospital in and
then for another year he went and worked in a medical hospital in Brazil not too far from where he
eventually started and then we came to the States for a year’s furlough and when he went back he was all
set to start a hospital, so he went to this town where he started with essentially nothing and gradually
worked the hospital. I remember my Grandfather who came – my mother’s father came and he was ill in
health and he lived there for a year and a half and passed away in Rio Verde but he did get very popular
just going around these streets saying, [highly pitched] “Hallo” and the boys would, [highly pitched]
“Hallo.” So he got to be known as Hallo. When he died they had one of the biggest funeral services.
The custom there was for everybody to follow the casket all the way to the cemetery.
Smith: So did your father and your grandfather work together at all?
Gordon: No, my grandfather was retired at this point but he had an only child, which was my mother.
He actually went to visit them in Peru and lived with them in Bayer and a couple different places and died
in Rio Verde.
Smith: So in the household did everyone get along? Did you ever fight with your brothers and sisters?
Did your Mom and Dad ever fight?
Gordon: Well, I fought with my older sister to some extent. Until 1938, when I was ten and she was
twelve my parents decided to send her to a boarding school in Brazil for a year and somehow that absence
sort of cut our fighting relationship and when she came back it was all lovey dovey. [Laughs] We got
along fine. I got along with my other siblings. Sometimes we would take our bicycles and load up with
books and games, blanket and take our bikes and ride out in the country.
Smith: Must have been a beautiful bike ride in Brazil.
4
Gordon: It was very beautiful, especially between the dry season and the wet season. The dry season
tended to be very dusty and then the wet season tended to be very muddy.
Smith: What type of area did you live in? Was it urban or more rural?
Gordon: The town was about 5,000 people so it had some modern conveniences. It had electricity
twenty hours a day and running water which sometimes ran and sometimes didn’t. My father got a large
city block, so to speak, of land; half of which was just meadow when he got it and half of it was houses
that he gradually bought up as they came on the market. He kind of built the buildings and he put in his
own water system. We had a windmill, bought from Sears Roebuck and if the wind gave out and we were
running low on water then he had an electric pump that he could turn on. If we didn’t have electricity then
I would get out there and I would pump the water by hand.
Smith: So you guys sound like you had a pretty handy family.
Gordon: Well, handy in some respects, yes.
Smith: So was your family considered as one of the wealthier families in Brazil? Were you well off
economically?
Gordon: Yes, well we had up in the States what would be called a very moderate home but my Mother
did get a gift from her cousin who was well off. Her name was Helen Gary Gordon and her maiden name
was Helen Gary. Her great uncle was the chairman of US Steel. They had quite a bit of money there so
her cousin gave her some extra money so they built the house that she liked.
Smith: So your mother came from money?
Gordon: Yea, her uncle, the one that was US Steel… Gary and Dan is named after my Great Uncle. He
actually paid for my mother to go to college cause even in those days, college was really expensive. [said
chuckling] Let me tell you about Dona Loide Emrich. I thought that was interesting. Before World War
II actually started I remember a conversation with her. Before World War II started you know the United
States was not the power that you know you usually think of. She thought that Germany was much more
advanced intellectually and scientifically and so forth so we had a little disagreement on that. I was
5
rooting for the United States and they started teaching foreign language when I was in third grade and it
was French, not English because French was really the second language of the world. It was a diplomatic
language before World War II.
Smith: That’s very interesting. Who exactly is Dona Loide Emrich?
Gordon: She was a teacher in the school. Her sister was the director of the school. The two of them sort
of founded the school.
Smith: And this was the school you attended in Brazil?
Gordon: Yeah. I attended this school from 1936 up till 1943.
Smith: Was their [Brazil’s] school system similar to ours? Elementary school, then middle school, and so
forth?
Gordon: Not quite. No. This was a normal school but it started with first grade and people in that area
didn’t have much education. A lot of them didn’t start first grade until they were nine. So we had three
years of elementary school. Two years, which I guess you could call middle school and then four years of
normal school. So when I was twelve years old I was doing practice teaching.
Smith: Really? Already?
Gordon: Yeah. I taught first grade; a geography course for half an hour, once a week. The principal was
hard up for teachers so she was making the most of it.
Smith: It sounds like their [Brazil’s] school system is an accelerated version of ours. Get through it in
less time.
Gordon: Yeah. Don’t get me wrong. Brazil has caught up with the United States in many respects.
Smith: Of course they have. So you were teaching classes by the time you were twelve. Does that mean
you spoke Portuguese as well?
Gordon: Yes. I had learned it right from the start because by the time I was two I was inbred so I was
speaking Portuguese with some people. [During] the furlough in 1935 I got a little rusty on the
Portuguese because we didn’t speak Portuguese [in the States] for a year, but then I came back [to Brazil]
6
I took a few lessons to brush up. I did fine in Portuguese until I came to the States and then my
Portuguese tended to get a little rusty. About ten or twenty years ago I was able to go down there and
they have an organization much like NASA and I gave lectures to them on satellites. Things like thermal
design and so forth. I stuck my neck out and said I would give the lectures in Portuguese. Now I had
learned Portuguese as a child and here I was teaching a very technical topic and I certainly didn’t know
the technical words but I had – how we doing [checks his watch] – lots of help from the students and I got
along fine. One student told me that he appreciated me giving the lecture in Portuguese because he could
understand English but if I had given the lecture in English half of his brain would be translating the
English to Portuguese and then the other half trying to understand. There was only one student who
didn’t appreciate it. This student had come from India and he didn’t know too much Portuguese but
understood English very well.
Both: [Laughs]
Gordon: But anyway let’s get back to the start of the World War.
Smith: Yea, so it began when you were still living in Brazil.
Gordon: Yes. September 1st, 1939.
Smith: Of course, when Germany invaded Poland. Do you remember that day?
Gordon: Yes. We had a clinic or hospital in one building and a long path up to our home which had just
been constructed and Senor Nego was walking with my father and me up toward our home. On that walk
he was explaining that Germany was invading Poland. He sort of knew that war was coming and
explaining this to my father. We only had a few radios in town and of course no television so the news
every once in a while [was accessible]. Might get a paper every once in a while. My mother did have a
radio and she would listen to BBC at night and that would sometimes tell us. I certainly remember when
World War II started.
Smith: So the first you heard of the war was on your walk with your father and his friend to your house.
What was your first reaction personally?
7
Gordon: I was really too young to be effected. I was just taking it in.
Smith: How old were you at this time.
Gordon: I was eleven.
Smith: Did the beginning of the war affect the way Brazilians lived at all? Did people change their daily
routines?
Gordon: Not initially and it affected us less living up in the interior [of Brazil]. I mean in our town cars
were still somewhat of a rarity so the ox carts and the horses ran just the same. There was a gasoline
shortage and later on in the war the private cars were forbidden to run. It was essentially a zero gas
rationing. Some of the cars were converted to run on charcoal and you have a charcoal burner in the back
and before you drive anywhere you would have to get the charcoal fire running and then there was a tube
that took the partially burned gases up into the carburetor and it of course wrecked the engine after a few
years and ashes would come out the back of the car. They had a lot of those that they called guzochenu
[rough spelling of a Portuguese slang word].
Smith: So at this time your parents were working? Were you helping out your father with the hospital or
your mother with anything?
Gordon: Not when I was twelve. When I got up to fourteen and fifteen I did get a job as secretary of the
hospital and one of my jobs was to take the files out on various patients and put them in numerical
sequence and of course if anybody put the file back in the wrong place it was sort of lost and that was a
tragedy in terms of the doctor getting the record. I was the only one allowed to put the file back into the
drawer and the nurses and doctors would pull the files out.
Smith: I’d like to get back to a little more about your childhood in Brazil. What sort of things would you
do for fun? Did you play with your brothers and sisters? Did you play sports? Did you explore? You’ve
already mentioned the bicycle rides.
8
Gordon: Yeah. My father built a basketball court in town just about the time the town was waking up to
basketball. Since no one had had much experience shooting basketballs before scores of games tended to
be ten to four rather than eighty to seventy. [said chuckling]
Both: [Laughs]
Smith: Did you have an organized league or was it just a show up and start a neighborhood game?
Gordon: No. A lot of it was just neighborhood game. The nurses had gymnastics. My mother taught
gymnastics on the basketball court and she was quite musical. She had this pump organ and she would
play. Each tune had an exercise that would go with it. Getting back to my siblings though, my parents
got quite a few games. My father liked chess. In fact, I learned to play chess when I was six years old in
the States. My father was very busy but he did come home for lunch and we would play a game during
lunch. If he got really interested in the game and there weren’t any emergency patients [chuckling] our
game might go on. Outdoor sports, of course soccer was the big thing down there.
Smith: Who exactly would attend your mother’s gymnastics lessons?
Gordon: Oh the nurses. This was required; required exercise, yea.
Smith: What type of patients would your father’s hospital admit? Was it a public hospital or private?
Gordon: [Chuckling.] It was the only hospital in town. It was known as the Hospital Evengelico or
Evangelic Hospital. It then became known as the Presbyterian Hospital of Rio Verde.
Smith: Were you raised Presbyterian?
Gordon: I was Presbyterian, yeah.
Smith: Is that what you remain today?
Gordon: Well, when I was there I was Presbyterian. When I went to Concord I went to a Congregational
church when I was living with my Uncle and Aunt. When I went to college my roommate was a Baptist
so I became a Baptist. Graduate school, again Congregational and then I was drafted – this is post World
War II – I was drafted and they postponed my draft date while I was getting my education. I was getting
9
my Ph.D. and then they drafted me and because I had my doctor’s degree they stationed me at Fort
Dietrich for two years.
Smith: So your father and your mother remained happily married for their entire lives?
Gordon: Oh yes.
Smith: How long were they married?
Gordon: Well, I went back to Brazil to help them celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They had
retired from working in Rio Verde but were having their wedding anniversary in Rio Verde. My mother
lived to her late eighties I think and my father would go back to Rio Verde every two years where they
were always glad to see him. Since he went back every two years on his 98th birthday they told him,
“Well you come back for your 100th birthday and we’ll give you a celebration,” and he said, “Well I don’t
know if I can make it but if I can I’ll go.” He was in a retirement home – Presbyterian home in D.C. and
the chaplain told me, “I don’t know whether your father will get back from Rio Verde but I know he’s
going to get there.” [Laughs] He did and my son and cousin got the idea that we should go down there
and celebrate his birthday. Out of 54 possible, 47 of us made it down to Rio Verde for his birthday.
Smith: I guess Brazil was really in his heart then. When he moved your family there in 1929 was this the
first time he had lived or travelled to Brazil in his life?
Gordon: Yes, that was the first time he had been to Brazil.
Smith: Do you recall how old he was when the church sent him to Brazil?
Gordon: He was born in 1897 and we moved there in 1929 so he was 32 but he had spent some years as I
told you learning Portuguese and getting his medical diploma revalidated so he was almost 40 when he
started the hospital and he worked there for 25 years.
Smith: Out of the two of your parents, which do you think had a greater impact or influence on you?
Gordon: Well, they both had a lot of influence on me. My mother had a lot more contact with us because
she was home and my father; there were some years there when he was very busy. In fact he went to
interview a doctor asking the doctor to come work with him and the doctor did accept. It was the first
10
doctor that worked with him. He said that one of the reasons that he had accepted was because my father
fell asleep when he was in the interview.
Both: [Laughs.]
Smith: The hospital that your father had built in Rio Verde. I was curious about where the funding came
from to build it. Where did that come from?
Gordon: Well, his salary was paid by five churches that supported him. Nowadays missionaries have
twenty five or thirty supporting churches. These five paid his salary. The town donated half of the land
for the hospital. He also got various donations. There was one church in New Jersey. I’m sorry I can’t
remember which church it was but they planned to build an addition to their church. They had a building
fund campaign raising the money to do it and then somehow they decided that they could get along
without their building and they gave the money all to my father to put a wing on the hospital. All the
hospital salaries and capital funds mostly came from the patients. My father never turned anybody away
even if they couldn’t pay, but he did hire one fellow, I remember, to go around to the farms to collect
hospital bills.
Smith: What were the people in town like? Were they well off? Was it a farming town?
Gordon: The main business when we got there was cattle and they would raise cattle and drive them
south to – the British had a canning [a tad bit inaudible on recording so not sure if this is correct word]
factory in Bahetus which was a few hundred miles from where we were, but they would drive the cattle
down there. I was rather surprised on a recent visit. A friend of mine had some cattle and they now move
the cattle with trucks [chuckling]. They don’t drive them at all. I do want to speak on my flight to the
United States.
Smith: Of course.
Gordon: My father was due for furlough in 1942 but since these ships were being sunk they decided it
wasn’t safe for the missionaries to go. My father actually had a three month vacation in Santos in ’42 but
11
then in ’44, actually ’43, the missions decided they couldn’t postpone furloughs too long, otherwise when
the war ended all the missionaries would want to take furlough at the same time.
Smith: Can you define exactly what a furlough is?
Gordon: Well, nowadays they call it home assignment, because it’s not a twelve month vacation. My
father would work in hospitals and pick up new techniques and they would go around and visit their
churches and of course they would visit their family too. So it was a busy year for them. Anyways Pan
American Airways had a flight from Sao Paulo to Miami. It took four days. I guess I told you.
Smith: Four days?
Gordon: Four days. They didn’t fly at night time and these were propeller airplanes not the jet planes. So
one day we had to fly across Brazil. Another day we had to fly over the Andes [Mountains]. We had
some oxygen but we didn’t have oxygen masks so we did go up to 16,000 feet where pilots are supposed
to put masks on as soon as they go over 10,000 feet. I remember being pretty air sick. We had got to
Bolivia. We had just got to the airport we just laid down and tried to recoup and then we went to Peru and
my parents had worked there for three years so they had friends there and we planned to stay over there
for two days. Then there was another flight to Panama. We got to Panama and we were supposed to
continue on to Miami but in those days’ planes that flew over water were hydroplanes and Pan America
had trouble with hydroplanes. Passengers had sort of piled up in Panama so we were stuck for five days
but back in those days airlines paid for your room and board.
Smith: So you had a free stay in Panama.
Gordon: Yeah. Then we took a train from Miami up to Washington D.C. and eventually made it up to
New England. That was about a twenty four hour train ride and this was war time now so the trains were
packed with a lot of soldiers and civilians. A lot of people would be either standing up or sitting on suit
cases.
Smith: So it was a bit of an uncomfortable train ride?
12
Gordon: Well, it was kind of exciting for a small boy. Well, I guess I wasn’t that small, I was onto
fourteen by now. My brother’s wife’s parents were also missionaries in Brazil and she, Karen Daugherty,
wrote about their experiences and they flew up about a month before we flew up and she spends several
pages describing their trip up so I Xeroxed them so you can look over them later. [Hands me a few pages
Xeroxed from a book that he has in front of him] Its four pages and they were going to Panama City and a
few pages before this she talks about meeting Dr. Donald Gordon.
Smith: That’s awesome. Thank you. Let’s talk more about your trip. Add up the days it took in all. You
had five days in Panama.
Gordon: Yeah. There were four flying days. Two days in Peru planned. Five days in Panama unplanned.
Six and five is eleven and then a day for the train ride, so twelve in all.
Smith: So it took you and your family twelve days to travel from Sao Paulo to Washington D.C. and you
traveled by propeller plane, hydroplane, and train. Must have been some trip and you flew over the Andes
and got air sick. Before we move on to your time in the states I would like to make sure we cover
everything that happened in Brazil regarding the war. Did anything affect you personally?
Gordon: I forgot to mention here during the three month vacation [in Santos] that the Germans were
sinking ships so they were trying to get the cities dark. They took dark paint and painted the top half of
car headlights black so the headlights were cut way down.
Smith: For what reason did they want the cities dark?
Gordon: The city puts up a lot of light normally so that if you’re within a few miles of the city you can
see – in fact you can look at Rockville and see it on a dark night and see the difference it, and well,
Germantown is probably now getting up there too. A submarine looking for a ship can see the ship
silhouetted. I mean the periscope is right down at water’s edge. The Allies wanted to darken the cities
and the Germans wanted to use the light from the cities to sink the Ally ships.
Smith: Was this happening off the coast of Brazil?
13
Gordon: Yeah. What happened was that early times the Germans were trying to blockade England so the
German subs started to operate right around England. Well, any land based plane could sink a sub so they
got a little bit further away from the island to try and stop the ships between the United States and Britain.
The United States developed carrier planes and it got pretty unhealthy for the States so they started
moving toward the South. They went around the Caribbean sinking ships.
Smith: So they started off the coast of Britain, then they moved to the coast of the United States, made
their way south to the Caribbean, and finally to the coast of Brazil. Brazil wasn’t involved in any way
politically, were they?
Gordon: The Allies, when they started invading Europe, they actually started in Africa. The first landing
was in North Africa and then from North Africa they went to Sicily and then they landed at the town of
Anziel [name of town may be off sound comes off very muffled and difficult to understand] and the
Allies were fighting the Germans there and at that time the Brazilians had some troops there. It wasn’t
any major effort, but they did have troops fighting there.
Smith: They were fighting with the Allies against Nazi Germany. Correct?
Gordon: Yeah.
Smith: If it wasn’t a heavy engagement then it didn’t really affect you living in a small town in the heart
of Brazil.
Gordon: It didn’t affect me because I was an American. I did not come under their universal military
training. Most Brazilians would have six months to a year of military training. This was even before the
war. This was sort of the standard. One other thing that happened was that the Brazilian government was
sort of afraid of spies and there were a lot of people from Germany living in Southern Brazil; so speaking
a foreign language in public became unpopular.
Smith: So anything but Portuguese?
Gordon: Portuguese was the safe language.
Smith: But when you were in your house, did you pretty much only speak English?
14
Gordon: Yeah.
Smith: But you knew French as well as Portuguese?
Gordon: Well I never ended up learning too much French in spite of the three years French. He [teacher]
didn’t teach conversational French. Mostly what I remember is verbs and I don’t remember much of
those. Actually, for three months when we went to that vacation in Santos for my father, I studied Latin.
I’ve not only forgotten all that I learned in Latin, I forgot that I studied Latin. [Both Laughs] I went
around for a number of years telling people I had never studied Latin. Then one day I was looking
through my old notebooks. Whoops here’s a Latin notebook. [Chuckles]
Smith: Latin must have made quite an impact. Did you have any Brazilian friends whose lives were
particularly affected by the war?
Gordon: It affected people a bit more in Santos where we went on the coast but up in our town we were
pretty isolated.
Smith: Where exactly in Brazil, geographically, is Sao Paulo and…?
Gordon: Oh, I’m sorry I meant to have a map with me. [Mr. Gordon proceeds to take out a piece of paper
and draw a map of Brazil locating the towns which are important in his story thus far. Rio Verde where
his father began his first hospital is just southwest of the current capital city of Brasilia which is in the
heart of Brazil. Santos is located on the southeast coast of Brazil and Sao Paulo is located a few miles
inland from Santos.] There was a train that we would take from Sao Paulo to Santos and I went up to Sao
Paulo a few times by myself and they were a little bit anxious about documents. I went up to Sao Paulo
for, I think, a dentist appointment and then when I wanted to get back on the train I had my identity card
but I was young and the guy said, “You have to be travelling with an adult.” I said, “Well my parents are
in Santos which is my destination. How do I get there?” So he thought and saw one of the incoming
passengers and beckoned him over and said, “This boy needs an adult with him. Would you be willing to
go with him?” The guy said, “Sure.”
Smith: So you just had a stranger accompany you?
15
Gordon: [chuckling] Yeah.
Smith: Rio Verde is where your father started his hospital and it looks like on your map that it is right in
the heart of Brazil a little to the west of Brasilia.
Gordon: Rio Verde means Green River.
Smith: What was the landscape here like? Was it mainly forest, rain forest?
Gordon: It is what they call ser ton, a lot of grass, bushes and a few trees that would not grow too high,
but then near the streams you would have dense woods.
Smith: I guess we can now move on to Concord. We can talk about your trip from Brazil to Peru up to
Panama to Miami up to DC to New England. In New England, you were in Concord, Massachusettes?
Gordon: Yes, for the spring of 1944.
Smith: Did your whole family make that trip?
Gordon: All six of us made that trip. My father’s mother was in Connecticut; so we went to
Connecticut. All his brothers and sisters (He had six siblings) were living in the general area. My mother
needed an operation; so I went to Concord for a few months, well essentially for the spring semester. My
oldest sister started Wellesley. No, she went to prep school for a semester. My younger brother went to
Albany with another uncle there who had a boy about his age. My younger sister, Alma, went to another
uncle in Albany, but did not get along too well there; so then she went with my grandmother for a little
while. Then, as soon as my parents could, they got a home in Hartford. In the fall, I was a day student at
this Loomis School while my parents were in Hartford. Then, when my parents went back to Brazil, I
became a border.
Smith: So, it sounds like your family was pretty much spread all over New England, your siblings were
at least and your parents were living in Hartford.
Gordon: Yeah.
Smith: Did you want to talk about the savings bonds?
16
Gordon: When I came to the States, people were in a much more war footing, then the interior of Brazil.
I learned right away about savings bonds. In High School, they were selling savings stamps and you could
buy a savings stamp for twenty five cents and paste it in a book. When you got up to eighteen dollars and
seventy five cents, you could turn that in for a bond. A twenty-five dollar bond cost eighteen dollars and
seventy-five cents and matured in ten years or so, I think. There was a great drive to get people to invest.
That was one of the ways they paid for the war. Instead of having the debt held by the Chinese or
whoever is holding our debts today.
Smith: Yeah. They funded their own war by pushing these bonds? Did you start any of these Savings
Bonds yourself?
Gordon: Well, I bought enough stamps to fill one book and turned that into one bond. My grandmother
on Christmas Day, gave a savings bond to each of her grandchildren.
Smith: Really?
Gordon: Eighteen grandchildren.
Smith: So the method was you would give twenty-five cents until you got up to eighteen seventy-five,
but you had to wait ten years before you got up to twenty five dollars? I assume you did cash that savings
bond at one point?
Gordon: Yeah, eventually. Actually, later on they passed a law that if you held a twenty five dollar
savings bond for more time, the interest would continue to accumulate.
Smith: Really? Keep it going?
Gordon: Yeah.
Smith: All of your Brothers and Sisters did the same thing? Or do you remember any other major events
that affected kids in school or anything?
Gordon: I don’t know what my younger Sister did. But the other major thing that I remember
particularly was D-Day which was June 6, 1944. I was going to high school. I had regular classes with
different subjects and different teachers. Well, D Day was at like 5 or 6 in the morning, French time,
17
which means by the time we got to school at 8 o’clock here, you have eight hours difference. We got the
news coming in about D-Day. Students were just interested in listening to the radio. The teacher was
interested in listening to the radio. Somebody got a radio for most classes. The bell would still ring. The
bell was set to ring like school bells do and we would change classes. Go to another class with another
group of students and listen to the radio some more.
Both: [chuckles]
Smith: So you were sixteen at this time and you were in school on D-Day. What kind of news were you
getting?
Gordon: Well, it was classified how far they had gotten. The fact that D-Day had started and D-Day
was progressing well. Churchill would make a statement and Eisenhower would make a statement. The
radio could find things to talk about.
Smith: What were people’s reactions like? I mean, D-Day was a huge victory for us, but we lost a lot of
soldiers.
Gordon: It was very different for the families that had someone over there going on D-Day and the
families that didn’t.
Smith: Of course.
Gordon: Nobody in our immediate family. Our father was too young for World War I and too old for
World War II. I might have been drafted except that my draft board let me continue my education.
Smith: So I guess no one in your immediate family was affected? How much older was Hope, your
older sister then you?
Gordon: Two years, but in World War II, they did not draft women, period.
Smith: Oh, yeah, they did not; so she did not serve as a nurse or anything?
Gordon: I had two cousins that went into the U. S. Coastguard SPAR; so there were the WACS, army
women, the WAVES, Navy women and the Spars, Coastguard women.
Smith: SPAR?
18
Gordon: I don’t know. I forget what it stood for.
Both: [Laughs]
Smith: That’s an abbreviation for something, I assume.
Gordon: Maybe an abbreviation for semper gratis, always ready.
Smith: That would make sense then. So, this was in Concord when you were still going to high school?
Then, your parents moved back to Brazil in the fall of 1944?
Gordon: Not till Christmas. I wanted to tell a little bit about my prep school there. In this fall of 1944,
the war had started in 1939; they had drafted a lot of young men into various things. I mean, we were
fighting in the Pacific after 1941 as well as fighting Germany. The result of taking a lot of young men out
of the country was that the colleges’ attendance dropped way down.
Smith: Of course.
Gordon: The effect on the prep schools was the students were too young to be drafted, but some of the
teachers were draft age. So a lot of the teachers went off to war. Some of the college professors who did
not have students in college came to the prep schools to teach. For English, I had a professor from
Amherst teaching me.
Smith: What was the name of your school?
Gordon: Loomis.
Smith: Was that the name of your boarding school?
Gordon: Well, I went there as day student while my parents were at Hartford.
Smith: So, you were a day student and you were commuting. Then, when they moved back to Brazil,
you became a border.
Gordon: Yes. OK. I wanted to tell about picking potatoes. The farmers’ labor was off to war. Potatoes
grew without too much labor until they were ready to be picked. They did have primitive machines
which would dig the potatoes out of the dirt and leave them on top of the dirt. All they needed was
someone to pick up the potatoes and put them in these bags. In our school, there were about 300 students.
19
It was a four year prep school, all boys. Every day one class would go out. The seniors would go one
day, the juniors would go out the next day. So the farmers were having man power every day, picking up
the potatoes. With some of our classes, we would just miss one day of school out of four. Except in my
science class, half the students were seniors and half the students were juniors, but the teacher had to go
out of the field with the sophomores. So one day he would be gone, one day I would be gone and one day
he would be teaching to half of the class. It was only for two or three months.
Smith: This was due to the labor shortage? Did you get paid or was this volunteer work?
Gordon: I don’t think we got paid. This was contributing to the war effort.
Smith: [Laughs.] Is that what everyone thought? That was your contribution?
Gordon: Well, everyone was trying to help. There was also rationing. Butter, Gasoline, and a lot of
other things.
Smith: Yeah, I remember reading about that and my professor mentioned that fact. Do you remember
why that was? What was the reason for butter? I can understand gasoline, but butter? I don’t really
understand the rationing of butter?
Gordon: I hadn’t thought about it much, but this was before oleo was invented; so there wasn’t any
margarine. Butter had to come from the farmers.
Smith: That makes sense then.
Gordon: It comes from cream which comes from milk.
Smith: Which comes from cows.
Gordon: I don’t think there were too many milking machines in those days; so there is a lot of hand
labor involved. The amount of butter was available, but limited. Towards the end of the war, they got
oleo, but the butter industry was able to get Congress to pass a law saying you could not color the oleo
yellow because that was cheating the customer.
Both: [Laughs.]
20
Gordon: So the oleo people would package the oleo and inside was this package was a little yellow pill.
You pressed the pill and broke the pill so the powder got into the oleo. You squeezed it and squeezed
until the color was evenly distributed. That was OK because the customer was not cheated. The customer
could see it was not butter.
Both: [Laughs.]
Smith: At school, was the war a topic of discussion all the time?
Gordon: Quite a bit. I remember particularly the day Roosevelt died. He passed away when I was at
Loomis. It may have been the spring of 1945 when he passed away, but the news went out very rapidly.
Of course we were in prep school and Roosevelt had been President for a long time. As far as we could
remember, he was the only President. He had been elected in 1932 when I was only four years old. It
was quite a shock. Sometimes we would have chapel speakers that would talk about the war. Oh, yes and
one other factor that affected me was there was a Loomis Student before I went there that went off to war
and was killed. His mother was Mrs. Sample and that was their only son.
Smith: Oh my.
Gordon: So, his things were still at Loomis and I got to pick some of his clothes. Nice overcoats.
Smith: They gave the stuff away?
Gordon: I would write her [Mrs. Sample] and tell her. Of course, I didn’t make up for the loss of her
son, but I kept in touch with her. She was in Cleveland, Ohio. Years later, I was still writing to her. If
her son had lived, had a wife, and had children, then she would have had family. She was very lonely.
Smith: Such a sad story.
Gordon: I’m sure that happened lots of places.
Smith: I can imagine.
Gordon: I wanted to tell about Christmas 1944 which was when my parents went back to Brazil. They
had been invited by Chaplain Willard to come to Parris Island. I spent Christmas with them. He was a
21
Chaplain in the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps has a base on Paris Island. He was later sent off to the
Pacific Ocean. He landed with the troops in Guadalcanal.
Smith: Oh, really?
Gordon: He fortunately survived. He wrote a book about his experiences as a Chaplain. He was landing
with the first troops. He wasn’t exactly on the front line, but he was not far from it. He had started a camp
on Cape Cod, Camp Good News. Well, let me finish about Paris Island. We spent Christmas with them.
When our days were over, we went over to Yemassee which was the nearest train station. My sister and I
took a train that went north. She was going back Wellesley and I was going back to Loomis. My parents
with their two [younger] children went south to Miami and I think flew from there back to Brazil.
Smith: So, your two younger siblings went back with them to Brazil?
Gordon: Yes, Hope and I stayed in this country.
Smith: So, you were sixteen at that time.
Gordon: Then, in the summer of 1945, my sister and I applied to Camp Good News, which had been
started by Chaplin Willard, as counselors. We went there both in ‘45 and ‘46. The camp had a rough
time because Chaplin Willard was away [in the Pacific]. His wife sort of kept the thing going. We were
near Camp Edwards which is on Cape Cod. Fighter planes were flying over the camp all the time,
sometimes fairly low.
Smith: Was this like a summer camp? Any normal summer camp where you play games and have fun?
Did that isolate you from the talk of the war? Did everyone still talk about it? Obviously the fighter
planes flying over must have reminded you that it was still going on.
Gordon: Not too much. There were fewer cars around then might have been if cars were plentiful.
Forestdale was. Sandwich was six miles away from our camp and a few times we walked all the way to
Sandwich.
Smith: So in a way it did really isolate you. Were you able to listen to the radio at all?
22
Gordon: We would get some news, but the Camp was pretty much self-contained. One of my campers
and I liked to talk about rockets. He and I actually planned [drew] a plane, pretty childish plane, but let’s
put the control room up front and let’s put the sleeping quarters here and we need a bathroom.
Both: [Laughs.]
Smith: So, you were drawing outlines to planes?
Gordon: Yeah.
Smith: That kind of thing really interested you. I’m not sure what your career was. What did you end up
doing towards the end of the war? You have a doctorate you mentioned.
Gordon: Yeah. Ok. Let me just say, right after the war, I made two predictions. I didn’t exactly get
them printed or anything, but I remember them very clearly. The atom bomb was dropped, Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, I sort of felt if the world can go twenty-five years without an all out nuclear war, we will
have it made. To some extent, that prediction became fulfilled because while it is possible that a terrorist
could still get hold of or make an atom bomb and might cause a lot of damage to one city. It would make
the World Trade Towers just seem like a play thing compared to that. What we were really facing was
hundreds of atom bombs and of course twenty years after World War II, we had thousands of bombs. I
don’t know how familiar you are with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Smith: I know of the situation.
Gordon: Well, to make a long story short, the United States didn’t find out until after the cold war ended
that the Cubans not only had nuclear missiles, but the Cubans had the authority to fire them. The United
States never gave the authority to any other country to fire our atom bombs. There were plenty of
military at that time suggesting we invade Cuba.
Smith: Yeah, I remember. Well, I don’t remember, but I read about it.
Gordon: Anyway, my second prediction was that we will have a man on the moon in ten years. We
were very optimistic on rockets, but in a sense I think that was fulfilled because the United States really
did not get started building that until President Kennedy said we will get a man on the moon by the end of
23
the decade. There was a fifteen year delay there, but it did take ten years to get the Apollo 11 crew on the
moon. So, you want to know what I have done since World War II?
Smith: I was hoping to lead into I guess World War II was on the tail end of 1945, you were about
seventeen and applying to college. I know you attended college; so I was wondering if the fact so many
people were at war affected the application process for college?
Gordon: Not really. I think I had read enough; my mother made sure we had lots of books;
encyclopedia, Book of Knowledge and so forth. I was interested in science when I came to the States.
When I went to Loomis I took a general science course which included Physics and Chemistry. By the
time I finished Loomis, I narrowed in on Physics. So when I went to College, unlike a lot of people, I
was set on a Physics major. I went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut. They had a terrific Professor to
teach freshman Physics. At most colleges, professors rotate teaching freshman Physics because they
don’t like it. A lot of them are more interested in their graduate students and research program. Anyway
in our class, he had about ten actual Physics demonstrations every lecture. He was one of the three best
Physics professors in terms of lecture demonstrations. He looked around in his class and got to know
which the better students were. From later years, I know he went bragging around to other professors,
“You know there is this bright kid here.” So, in my spring semester of my freshman year, another
professor who was doing research in quartz crystals came to me and said, “if you would like to go into
our laboratory and learn to use the instruments, you would not get paid, but if you learn to use the
instruments, we can probably give you a summer job after your freshman year.” That was a marvelous
opportunity! I was on the swimming team the fall of my freshman year, but that was the last of athletics.
[Laughing]
Smith: Yeah, making money is better.
Gordon: I worked the summer after my freshman year. I worked part time during my sophomore year
and all summer after sophomore year. At the beginning of my junior year, the professor comes to me and
24
says, “We have taken all this data. How would you like to put together a theory that would predict what
measurements we get here and there?” My reaction was, “Who? Me?!?”
Both: [Laughs.]
Gordon: It was not until years later that I realized he was asking me to do something that he could not
really do himself.
Smith: Really?
Gordon: He was very good at directing his research effort, but the research was experimental. He would
take quarts crystals and plate them. The net result was I came up with a pretty good theory. I just
happened to have my honors thesis here.
[Dr. Gordon pulls out a book with a number of graphs in it]
Gordon: This is how well the theory which is the curve agreed with the experimental points. This was a
particular crystal with strips. So, that was an unusual opportunity. I don’t know how much you know
about quartz crystals.
Smith: Not very much.
Gordon: They were used in World War II heavily. There were two uses. First, in tanks for radio
communications and we did not have any electronic circuits. Actually, your watch has a little quartz
crystal. The tank would use these little quartz crystals at a definite frequency. They could have a lot of
channels to talk to different people, but you could not use a coil and a condenser because the tank shakes
it up too much. So, they were getting quartz and using it for tanks. The other use is sonar. Sonar was
developed during the war to find submarines. They used these quartz crystals. I got involved in that
research right after the war. One of the textbooks written by Professor Cady which came out in 1946 just
after the war was used a lot to discuss this topic.
[As Dr. Gordon speaks of the text book he pulls it out to and flips through it very quickly for the two of
us to glance at.]
Smith: So in 1945, did you see any celebrations since the war had ended?
25
Gordon: Well, the college football team was getting some GI’s to play football and the first three years
of college we had an undefeated team.
Smith: That’s pretty awesome.
Gordon: The coach got all these offers from these big colleges and in big colleges as long as the coach
has a winning football team, he is good. Once he starts losing, he may lose his job. My Wesleyan coach
decided he would stay at Wesleyan. He would do a good job regardless of what the scores were.
Smith: He would stay.
Gordon: OK. Then, I went to graduate school.
Smith: Was it easier to get into college since attendance was down? Obviously, you had good grades but
was it easier to get into undergraduate schools because of the low attendance.
Gordon: Well, a good prep school has a certain reputation with colleges. My prep school prepared me
for college so well that when I got to college I could relax and study less. I had a lot of time for my other
work. Getting into college was not a problem for me. When I finished college the professor that directed
my work suggested I go to Harvard. He had students who had gone to Harvard and were now teachers at
Harvard. He actually drove me to Harvard to see it. What college professor drives a student to see a
college? Well, there were three professors and there were only three Physics majors. After the visit, the
professor turned to me and says, “Well, you are in!” I said, “What do you mean? We have to wait until
April. They did not tell us that I am in.” My professor said, “But when we said goodbye to him, he
replied, ‘We will see you around.’”
Both: [Laughs.]
Gordon: When the day came for acceptances, I got an acceptance.
Smith: So, you ended up going to grad school at Harvard to study Physics? Wow! Is that where you got
your Ph. D?
Gordon: Yes, at Harvard, I worked on cosmic rays and elementary particles. My faculty advisor had
helped discover the first mu-meson. This is the first elementary particle that is not part of the atom. The
26
atom has protons, neutrons and electrons. I tried to find a new particle but all I did was to perfect an
apparatus which another student had built and I proved what the first graduate student had seen is not a
new particle. Then I was drafted and went to Fort Dietrich for two years. I worked in a Physics
department that worked on taking biological things and disbursing them.
Smith: You mentioned earlier your draft date was postponed until you completed your education.
Gordon: Yes, it was postponed until I got my PhD. With a PhD, I could have gotten a commission as an
officer, but that would mean four years versus two years as a private. I just wanted to get in and get out.
Dietrich had a whole division of scientists and most of them had a master’s degree or doctorate. Most of
us felt that Dietrich was a lot better than fighting in Korea at that time. On the other hand it was the dregs
in regards to civilian life.

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

Oral History Collection
To read the transcript and listen to the audio of this interview at the same time, first download
the pdf of the transcript by clicking on the link at the top of this screen. The
transcript will open in a separate window. Next, select the option to the right of the
screen.
Special Collections
Musselman Library
Interview with
Gary D. Gordon
Interviewer: Teddy Smith
Interview Date: October 31, 2010
0
The Oral History of Dr.
Gary D. Gordon: Life
Leading up to and
Including World War Two
Interview conducted by Teddy Smith
History 300
Professor Birkner
11/2/2010
1
[The Date is October 31, 2010 and I have driven from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to Gaithersburg,
Maryland to interview Dr. Gary Gordon in his home located at 400 Center Street, PO Box 125
Washington Grove, Maryland 20880. The interview concerns his life from birth and earliest memories of
World War II and beyond.]
Teddy Smith: So we are sitting here with Mr. Gary D. Gordon who was born in 1928. So Mr. Gordon,
where and when was the exact date of your birth?
Dr. Gary D. Gordon: I was born in Elkins, West Virginia. My parents were on furlough and then when I
was about a year old they went to Brazil as medical missionaries and they landed in Brazil for the first
time in 1929.
Smith: What were your parents names?
Gordon: My father was Dr. Donald C. Gordon and my mother was Helen Gary Gordon.
Smith: They were medical missionaries. Were they both medical doctors?
Gordon: My father was a surgeon.
Smith: And what did your mother do?
Gordon: Well, she was mainly a house wife and helped my father in many ways and she had been a
missionary teacher before but when she got to Rio Verde. My father needed someone to administer the
anesthesia so she would administer the anesthesia. When he needed someone to teach the nurses, she
would teach the nurses. She had a textbook and just stayed a chapter ahead of them. When they needed a
director of the nursing school, she became the director of the nursing school. And then later in her career
she learned how to give injections.
[Laughs]
Smith: So she kind of just learned as she went?
Gordon: On the job.
[Laughs]
Smith: What inspired them to move their family to Brazil?
2
Gordon: Well, my father decided to be a missionary and he decided that he didn’t have the speaking
ability to be a pastor so he went into medicine and in college he had decided to go to medical missionary
to China. They were quite a few medical missionaries going to China in those days and I’m so glad that
he didn’t. My mother had been a missionary teacher in Bolivia and Chile a year in each under the
Methodist board and he proposed to her when she was in Chile by letter and she accepted by cable.
[Laughs] But she convinced him to talk to the Methodist board and they sent them to Peru so they started
to learn Spanish for three years. In Peru he was working as a surgeon in a large city hospital and he had
the pioneer spirit. He wanted to start a hospital where there wasn’t any hospital and the Methodist board
didn’t have anything like that so they went to the Presbyterians. The Presbyterians sent them to Brazil in
1929. When I was about two or three years old the first place they were at they were just learning the
language and he had to get his medical diploma revalidated but one of my earliest recollections was a
Zeppelin going across our back yard once a week. Germany had actually a weekly service from Germany
to Brazil.
Smith: And this was around what year?
Gordon: Early 1930s. Yes, this was before the Hindenburg caught fire which kind of put the kibosh on
the use of Zeppelins.
Smith: Did you have any siblings that were with you?
Gordon: Yes, I have an older sister named Hope and a younger brother named Alan and a younger sister
named Alma. Hope married a Brazilian pastor and stayed in Brazil all her life. She is still living there. My
brother Alan became a missionary like our father. He went back to Brazil and my sister Alma married a
pastor who was a missionary in Africa.
Smith: Seemed like everyone sort of stayed in the family business then. So your family stayed in Brazil
until 1943?
Gordon: Well I only stayed in Brazil until 1943. My parents stayed a lot later. When I was about fifteen,
I came to college in the states.
3
Smith: So what was life as a child like in Brazil? What sort of stuff did you do? What was school life
like?
Gordon: Well, I remember a very little bit about Bayer and then we went to Budi Chi. My father spent
about a year sort of exploring the interior of Brazil in order to pick the right town to start a hospital in and
then for another year he went and worked in a medical hospital in Brazil not too far from where he
eventually started and then we came to the States for a year’s furlough and when he went back he was all
set to start a hospital, so he went to this town where he started with essentially nothing and gradually
worked the hospital. I remember my Grandfather who came – my mother’s father came and he was ill in
health and he lived there for a year and a half and passed away in Rio Verde but he did get very popular
just going around these streets saying, [highly pitched] “Hallo” and the boys would, [highly pitched]
“Hallo.” So he got to be known as Hallo. When he died they had one of the biggest funeral services.
The custom there was for everybody to follow the casket all the way to the cemetery.
Smith: So did your father and your grandfather work together at all?
Gordon: No, my grandfather was retired at this point but he had an only child, which was my mother.
He actually went to visit them in Peru and lived with them in Bayer and a couple different places and died
in Rio Verde.
Smith: So in the household did everyone get along? Did you ever fight with your brothers and sisters?
Did your Mom and Dad ever fight?
Gordon: Well, I fought with my older sister to some extent. Until 1938, when I was ten and she was
twelve my parents decided to send her to a boarding school in Brazil for a year and somehow that absence
sort of cut our fighting relationship and when she came back it was all lovey dovey. [Laughs] We got
along fine. I got along with my other siblings. Sometimes we would take our bicycles and load up with
books and games, blanket and take our bikes and ride out in the country.
Smith: Must have been a beautiful bike ride in Brazil.
4
Gordon: It was very beautiful, especially between the dry season and the wet season. The dry season
tended to be very dusty and then the wet season tended to be very muddy.
Smith: What type of area did you live in? Was it urban or more rural?
Gordon: The town was about 5,000 people so it had some modern conveniences. It had electricity
twenty hours a day and running water which sometimes ran and sometimes didn’t. My father got a large
city block, so to speak, of land; half of which was just meadow when he got it and half of it was houses
that he gradually bought up as they came on the market. He kind of built the buildings and he put in his
own water system. We had a windmill, bought from Sears Roebuck and if the wind gave out and we were
running low on water then he had an electric pump that he could turn on. If we didn’t have electricity then
I would get out there and I would pump the water by hand.
Smith: So you guys sound like you had a pretty handy family.
Gordon: Well, handy in some respects, yes.
Smith: So was your family considered as one of the wealthier families in Brazil? Were you well off
economically?
Gordon: Yes, well we had up in the States what would be called a very moderate home but my Mother
did get a gift from her cousin who was well off. Her name was Helen Gary Gordon and her maiden name
was Helen Gary. Her great uncle was the chairman of US Steel. They had quite a bit of money there so
her cousin gave her some extra money so they built the house that she liked.
Smith: So your mother came from money?
Gordon: Yea, her uncle, the one that was US Steel… Gary and Dan is named after my Great Uncle. He
actually paid for my mother to go to college cause even in those days, college was really expensive. [said
chuckling] Let me tell you about Dona Loide Emrich. I thought that was interesting. Before World War
II actually started I remember a conversation with her. Before World War II started you know the United
States was not the power that you know you usually think of. She thought that Germany was much more
advanced intellectually and scientifically and so forth so we had a little disagreement on that. I was
5
rooting for the United States and they started teaching foreign language when I was in third grade and it
was French, not English because French was really the second language of the world. It was a diplomatic
language before World War II.
Smith: That’s very interesting. Who exactly is Dona Loide Emrich?
Gordon: She was a teacher in the school. Her sister was the director of the school. The two of them sort
of founded the school.
Smith: And this was the school you attended in Brazil?
Gordon: Yeah. I attended this school from 1936 up till 1943.
Smith: Was their [Brazil’s] school system similar to ours? Elementary school, then middle school, and so
forth?
Gordon: Not quite. No. This was a normal school but it started with first grade and people in that area
didn’t have much education. A lot of them didn’t start first grade until they were nine. So we had three
years of elementary school. Two years, which I guess you could call middle school and then four years of
normal school. So when I was twelve years old I was doing practice teaching.
Smith: Really? Already?
Gordon: Yeah. I taught first grade; a geography course for half an hour, once a week. The principal was
hard up for teachers so she was making the most of it.
Smith: It sounds like their [Brazil’s] school system is an accelerated version of ours. Get through it in
less time.
Gordon: Yeah. Don’t get me wrong. Brazil has caught up with the United States in many respects.
Smith: Of course they have. So you were teaching classes by the time you were twelve. Does that mean
you spoke Portuguese as well?
Gordon: Yes. I had learned it right from the start because by the time I was two I was inbred so I was
speaking Portuguese with some people. [During] the furlough in 1935 I got a little rusty on the
Portuguese because we didn’t speak Portuguese [in the States] for a year, but then I came back [to Brazil]
6
I took a few lessons to brush up. I did fine in Portuguese until I came to the States and then my
Portuguese tended to get a little rusty. About ten or twenty years ago I was able to go down there and
they have an organization much like NASA and I gave lectures to them on satellites. Things like thermal
design and so forth. I stuck my neck out and said I would give the lectures in Portuguese. Now I had
learned Portuguese as a child and here I was teaching a very technical topic and I certainly didn’t know
the technical words but I had – how we doing [checks his watch] – lots of help from the students and I got
along fine. One student told me that he appreciated me giving the lecture in Portuguese because he could
understand English but if I had given the lecture in English half of his brain would be translating the
English to Portuguese and then the other half trying to understand. There was only one student who
didn’t appreciate it. This student had come from India and he didn’t know too much Portuguese but
understood English very well.
Both: [Laughs]
Gordon: But anyway let’s get back to the start of the World War.
Smith: Yea, so it began when you were still living in Brazil.
Gordon: Yes. September 1st, 1939.
Smith: Of course, when Germany invaded Poland. Do you remember that day?
Gordon: Yes. We had a clinic or hospital in one building and a long path up to our home which had just
been constructed and Senor Nego was walking with my father and me up toward our home. On that walk
he was explaining that Germany was invading Poland. He sort of knew that war was coming and
explaining this to my father. We only had a few radios in town and of course no television so the news
every once in a while [was accessible]. Might get a paper every once in a while. My mother did have a
radio and she would listen to BBC at night and that would sometimes tell us. I certainly remember when
World War II started.
Smith: So the first you heard of the war was on your walk with your father and his friend to your house.
What was your first reaction personally?
7
Gordon: I was really too young to be effected. I was just taking it in.
Smith: How old were you at this time.
Gordon: I was eleven.
Smith: Did the beginning of the war affect the way Brazilians lived at all? Did people change their daily
routines?
Gordon: Not initially and it affected us less living up in the interior [of Brazil]. I mean in our town cars
were still somewhat of a rarity so the ox carts and the horses ran just the same. There was a gasoline
shortage and later on in the war the private cars were forbidden to run. It was essentially a zero gas
rationing. Some of the cars were converted to run on charcoal and you have a charcoal burner in the back
and before you drive anywhere you would have to get the charcoal fire running and then there was a tube
that took the partially burned gases up into the carburetor and it of course wrecked the engine after a few
years and ashes would come out the back of the car. They had a lot of those that they called guzochenu
[rough spelling of a Portuguese slang word].
Smith: So at this time your parents were working? Were you helping out your father with the hospital or
your mother with anything?
Gordon: Not when I was twelve. When I got up to fourteen and fifteen I did get a job as secretary of the
hospital and one of my jobs was to take the files out on various patients and put them in numerical
sequence and of course if anybody put the file back in the wrong place it was sort of lost and that was a
tragedy in terms of the doctor getting the record. I was the only one allowed to put the file back into the
drawer and the nurses and doctors would pull the files out.
Smith: I’d like to get back to a little more about your childhood in Brazil. What sort of things would you
do for fun? Did you play with your brothers and sisters? Did you play sports? Did you explore? You’ve
already mentioned the bicycle rides.
8
Gordon: Yeah. My father built a basketball court in town just about the time the town was waking up to
basketball. Since no one had had much experience shooting basketballs before scores of games tended to
be ten to four rather than eighty to seventy. [said chuckling]
Both: [Laughs]
Smith: Did you have an organized league or was it just a show up and start a neighborhood game?
Gordon: No. A lot of it was just neighborhood game. The nurses had gymnastics. My mother taught
gymnastics on the basketball court and she was quite musical. She had this pump organ and she would
play. Each tune had an exercise that would go with it. Getting back to my siblings though, my parents
got quite a few games. My father liked chess. In fact, I learned to play chess when I was six years old in
the States. My father was very busy but he did come home for lunch and we would play a game during
lunch. If he got really interested in the game and there weren’t any emergency patients [chuckling] our
game might go on. Outdoor sports, of course soccer was the big thing down there.
Smith: Who exactly would attend your mother’s gymnastics lessons?
Gordon: Oh the nurses. This was required; required exercise, yea.
Smith: What type of patients would your father’s hospital admit? Was it a public hospital or private?
Gordon: [Chuckling.] It was the only hospital in town. It was known as the Hospital Evengelico or
Evangelic Hospital. It then became known as the Presbyterian Hospital of Rio Verde.
Smith: Were you raised Presbyterian?
Gordon: I was Presbyterian, yeah.
Smith: Is that what you remain today?
Gordon: Well, when I was there I was Presbyterian. When I went to Concord I went to a Congregational
church when I was living with my Uncle and Aunt. When I went to college my roommate was a Baptist
so I became a Baptist. Graduate school, again Congregational and then I was drafted – this is post World
War II – I was drafted and they postponed my draft date while I was getting my education. I was getting
9
my Ph.D. and then they drafted me and because I had my doctor’s degree they stationed me at Fort
Dietrich for two years.
Smith: So your father and your mother remained happily married for their entire lives?
Gordon: Oh yes.
Smith: How long were they married?
Gordon: Well, I went back to Brazil to help them celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They had
retired from working in Rio Verde but were having their wedding anniversary in Rio Verde. My mother
lived to her late eighties I think and my father would go back to Rio Verde every two years where they
were always glad to see him. Since he went back every two years on his 98th birthday they told him,
“Well you come back for your 100th birthday and we’ll give you a celebration,” and he said, “Well I don’t
know if I can make it but if I can I’ll go.” He was in a retirement home – Presbyterian home in D.C. and
the chaplain told me, “I don’t know whether your father will get back from Rio Verde but I know he’s
going to get there.” [Laughs] He did and my son and cousin got the idea that we should go down there
and celebrate his birthday. Out of 54 possible, 47 of us made it down to Rio Verde for his birthday.
Smith: I guess Brazil was really in his heart then. When he moved your family there in 1929 was this the
first time he had lived or travelled to Brazil in his life?
Gordon: Yes, that was the first time he had been to Brazil.
Smith: Do you recall how old he was when the church sent him to Brazil?
Gordon: He was born in 1897 and we moved there in 1929 so he was 32 but he had spent some years as I
told you learning Portuguese and getting his medical diploma revalidated so he was almost 40 when he
started the hospital and he worked there for 25 years.
Smith: Out of the two of your parents, which do you think had a greater impact or influence on you?
Gordon: Well, they both had a lot of influence on me. My mother had a lot more contact with us because
she was home and my father; there were some years there when he was very busy. In fact he went to
interview a doctor asking the doctor to come work with him and the doctor did accept. It was the first
10
doctor that worked with him. He said that one of the reasons that he had accepted was because my father
fell asleep when he was in the interview.
Both: [Laughs.]
Smith: The hospital that your father had built in Rio Verde. I was curious about where the funding came
from to build it. Where did that come from?
Gordon: Well, his salary was paid by five churches that supported him. Nowadays missionaries have
twenty five or thirty supporting churches. These five paid his salary. The town donated half of the land
for the hospital. He also got various donations. There was one church in New Jersey. I’m sorry I can’t
remember which church it was but they planned to build an addition to their church. They had a building
fund campaign raising the money to do it and then somehow they decided that they could get along
without their building and they gave the money all to my father to put a wing on the hospital. All the
hospital salaries and capital funds mostly came from the patients. My father never turned anybody away
even if they couldn’t pay, but he did hire one fellow, I remember, to go around to the farms to collect
hospital bills.
Smith: What were the people in town like? Were they well off? Was it a farming town?
Gordon: The main business when we got there was cattle and they would raise cattle and drive them
south to – the British had a canning [a tad bit inaudible on recording so not sure if this is correct word]
factory in Bahetus which was a few hundred miles from where we were, but they would drive the cattle
down there. I was rather surprised on a recent visit. A friend of mine had some cattle and they now move
the cattle with trucks [chuckling]. They don’t drive them at all. I do want to speak on my flight to the
United States.
Smith: Of course.
Gordon: My father was due for furlough in 1942 but since these ships were being sunk they decided it
wasn’t safe for the missionaries to go. My father actually had a three month vacation in Santos in ’42 but
11
then in ’44, actually ’43, the missions decided they couldn’t postpone furloughs too long, otherwise when
the war ended all the missionaries would want to take furlough at the same time.
Smith: Can you define exactly what a furlough is?
Gordon: Well, nowadays they call it home assignment, because it’s not a twelve month vacation. My
father would work in hospitals and pick up new techniques and they would go around and visit their
churches and of course they would visit their family too. So it was a busy year for them. Anyways Pan
American Airways had a flight from Sao Paulo to Miami. It took four days. I guess I told you.
Smith: Four days?
Gordon: Four days. They didn’t fly at night time and these were propeller airplanes not the jet planes. So
one day we had to fly across Brazil. Another day we had to fly over the Andes [Mountains]. We had
some oxygen but we didn’t have oxygen masks so we did go up to 16,000 feet where pilots are supposed
to put masks on as soon as they go over 10,000 feet. I remember being pretty air sick. We had got to
Bolivia. We had just got to the airport we just laid down and tried to recoup and then we went to Peru and
my parents had worked there for three years so they had friends there and we planned to stay over there
for two days. Then there was another flight to Panama. We got to Panama and we were supposed to
continue on to Miami but in those days’ planes that flew over water were hydroplanes and Pan America
had trouble with hydroplanes. Passengers had sort of piled up in Panama so we were stuck for five days
but back in those days airlines paid for your room and board.
Smith: So you had a free stay in Panama.
Gordon: Yeah. Then we took a train from Miami up to Washington D.C. and eventually made it up to
New England. That was about a twenty four hour train ride and this was war time now so the trains were
packed with a lot of soldiers and civilians. A lot of people would be either standing up or sitting on suit
cases.
Smith: So it was a bit of an uncomfortable train ride?
12
Gordon: Well, it was kind of exciting for a small boy. Well, I guess I wasn’t that small, I was onto
fourteen by now. My brother’s wife’s parents were also missionaries in Brazil and she, Karen Daugherty,
wrote about their experiences and they flew up about a month before we flew up and she spends several
pages describing their trip up so I Xeroxed them so you can look over them later. [Hands me a few pages
Xeroxed from a book that he has in front of him] Its four pages and they were going to Panama City and a
few pages before this she talks about meeting Dr. Donald Gordon.
Smith: That’s awesome. Thank you. Let’s talk more about your trip. Add up the days it took in all. You
had five days in Panama.
Gordon: Yeah. There were four flying days. Two days in Peru planned. Five days in Panama unplanned.
Six and five is eleven and then a day for the train ride, so twelve in all.
Smith: So it took you and your family twelve days to travel from Sao Paulo to Washington D.C. and you
traveled by propeller plane, hydroplane, and train. Must have been some trip and you flew over the Andes
and got air sick. Before we move on to your time in the states I would like to make sure we cover
everything that happened in Brazil regarding the war. Did anything affect you personally?
Gordon: I forgot to mention here during the three month vacation [in Santos] that the Germans were
sinking ships so they were trying to get the cities dark. They took dark paint and painted the top half of
car headlights black so the headlights were cut way down.
Smith: For what reason did they want the cities dark?
Gordon: The city puts up a lot of light normally so that if you’re within a few miles of the city you can
see – in fact you can look at Rockville and see it on a dark night and see the difference it, and well,
Germantown is probably now getting up there too. A submarine looking for a ship can see the ship
silhouetted. I mean the periscope is right down at water’s edge. The Allies wanted to darken the cities
and the Germans wanted to use the light from the cities to sink the Ally ships.
Smith: Was this happening off the coast of Brazil?
13
Gordon: Yeah. What happened was that early times the Germans were trying to blockade England so the
German subs started to operate right around England. Well, any land based plane could sink a sub so they
got a little bit further away from the island to try and stop the ships between the United States and Britain.
The United States developed carrier planes and it got pretty unhealthy for the States so they started
moving toward the South. They went around the Caribbean sinking ships.
Smith: So they started off the coast of Britain, then they moved to the coast of the United States, made
their way south to the Caribbean, and finally to the coast of Brazil. Brazil wasn’t involved in any way
politically, were they?
Gordon: The Allies, when they started invading Europe, they actually started in Africa. The first landing
was in North Africa and then from North Africa they went to Sicily and then they landed at the town of
Anziel [name of town may be off sound comes off very muffled and difficult to understand] and the
Allies were fighting the Germans there and at that time the Brazilians had some troops there. It wasn’t
any major effort, but they did have troops fighting there.
Smith: They were fighting with the Allies against Nazi Germany. Correct?
Gordon: Yeah.
Smith: If it wasn’t a heavy engagement then it didn’t really affect you living in a small town in the heart
of Brazil.
Gordon: It didn’t affect me because I was an American. I did not come under their universal military
training. Most Brazilians would have six months to a year of military training. This was even before the
war. This was sort of the standard. One other thing that happened was that the Brazilian government was
sort of afraid of spies and there were a lot of people from Germany living in Southern Brazil; so speaking
a foreign language in public became unpopular.
Smith: So anything but Portuguese?
Gordon: Portuguese was the safe language.
Smith: But when you were in your house, did you pretty much only speak English?
14
Gordon: Yeah.
Smith: But you knew French as well as Portuguese?
Gordon: Well I never ended up learning too much French in spite of the three years French. He [teacher]
didn’t teach conversational French. Mostly what I remember is verbs and I don’t remember much of
those. Actually, for three months when we went to that vacation in Santos for my father, I studied Latin.
I’ve not only forgotten all that I learned in Latin, I forgot that I studied Latin. [Both Laughs] I went
around for a number of years telling people I had never studied Latin. Then one day I was looking
through my old notebooks. Whoops here’s a Latin notebook. [Chuckles]
Smith: Latin must have made quite an impact. Did you have any Brazilian friends whose lives were
particularly affected by the war?
Gordon: It affected people a bit more in Santos where we went on the coast but up in our town we were
pretty isolated.
Smith: Where exactly in Brazil, geographically, is Sao Paulo and…?
Gordon: Oh, I’m sorry I meant to have a map with me. [Mr. Gordon proceeds to take out a piece of paper
and draw a map of Brazil locating the towns which are important in his story thus far. Rio Verde where
his father began his first hospital is just southwest of the current capital city of Brasilia which is in the
heart of Brazil. Santos is located on the southeast coast of Brazil and Sao Paulo is located a few miles
inland from Santos.] There was a train that we would take from Sao Paulo to Santos and I went up to Sao
Paulo a few times by myself and they were a little bit anxious about documents. I went up to Sao Paulo
for, I think, a dentist appointment and then when I wanted to get back on the train I had my identity card
but I was young and the guy said, “You have to be travelling with an adult.” I said, “Well my parents are
in Santos which is my destination. How do I get there?” So he thought and saw one of the incoming
passengers and beckoned him over and said, “This boy needs an adult with him. Would you be willing to
go with him?” The guy said, “Sure.”
Smith: So you just had a stranger accompany you?
15
Gordon: [chuckling] Yeah.
Smith: Rio Verde is where your father started his hospital and it looks like on your map that it is right in
the heart of Brazil a little to the west of Brasilia.
Gordon: Rio Verde means Green River.
Smith: What was the landscape here like? Was it mainly forest, rain forest?
Gordon: It is what they call ser ton, a lot of grass, bushes and a few trees that would not grow too high,
but then near the streams you would have dense woods.
Smith: I guess we can now move on to Concord. We can talk about your trip from Brazil to Peru up to
Panama to Miami up to DC to New England. In New England, you were in Concord, Massachusettes?
Gordon: Yes, for the spring of 1944.
Smith: Did your whole family make that trip?
Gordon: All six of us made that trip. My father’s mother was in Connecticut; so we went to
Connecticut. All his brothers and sisters (He had six siblings) were living in the general area. My mother
needed an operation; so I went to Concord for a few months, well essentially for the spring semester. My
oldest sister started Wellesley. No, she went to prep school for a semester. My younger brother went to
Albany with another uncle there who had a boy about his age. My younger sister, Alma, went to another
uncle in Albany, but did not get along too well there; so then she went with my grandmother for a little
while. Then, as soon as my parents could, they got a home in Hartford. In the fall, I was a day student at
this Loomis School while my parents were in Hartford. Then, when my parents went back to Brazil, I
became a border.
Smith: So, it sounds like your family was pretty much spread all over New England, your siblings were
at least and your parents were living in Hartford.
Gordon: Yeah.
Smith: Did you want to talk about the savings bonds?
16
Gordon: When I came to the States, people were in a much more war footing, then the interior of Brazil.
I learned right away about savings bonds. In High School, they were selling savings stamps and you could
buy a savings stamp for twenty five cents and paste it in a book. When you got up to eighteen dollars and
seventy five cents, you could turn that in for a bond. A twenty-five dollar bond cost eighteen dollars and
seventy-five cents and matured in ten years or so, I think. There was a great drive to get people to invest.
That was one of the ways they paid for the war. Instead of having the debt held by the Chinese or
whoever is holding our debts today.
Smith: Yeah. They funded their own war by pushing these bonds? Did you start any of these Savings
Bonds yourself?
Gordon: Well, I bought enough stamps to fill one book and turned that into one bond. My grandmother
on Christmas Day, gave a savings bond to each of her grandchildren.
Smith: Really?
Gordon: Eighteen grandchildren.
Smith: So the method was you would give twenty-five cents until you got up to eighteen seventy-five,
but you had to wait ten years before you got up to twenty five dollars? I assume you did cash that savings
bond at one point?
Gordon: Yeah, eventually. Actually, later on they passed a law that if you held a twenty five dollar
savings bond for more time, the interest would continue to accumulate.
Smith: Really? Keep it going?
Gordon: Yeah.
Smith: All of your Brothers and Sisters did the same thing? Or do you remember any other major events
that affected kids in school or anything?
Gordon: I don’t know what my younger Sister did. But the other major thing that I remember
particularly was D-Day which was June 6, 1944. I was going to high school. I had regular classes with
different subjects and different teachers. Well, D Day was at like 5 or 6 in the morning, French time,
17
which means by the time we got to school at 8 o’clock here, you have eight hours difference. We got the
news coming in about D-Day. Students were just interested in listening to the radio. The teacher was
interested in listening to the radio. Somebody got a radio for most classes. The bell would still ring. The
bell was set to ring like school bells do and we would change classes. Go to another class with another
group of students and listen to the radio some more.
Both: [chuckles]
Smith: So you were sixteen at this time and you were in school on D-Day. What kind of news were you
getting?
Gordon: Well, it was classified how far they had gotten. The fact that D-Day had started and D-Day
was progressing well. Churchill would make a statement and Eisenhower would make a statement. The
radio could find things to talk about.
Smith: What were people’s reactions like? I mean, D-Day was a huge victory for us, but we lost a lot of
soldiers.
Gordon: It was very different for the families that had someone over there going on D-Day and the
families that didn’t.
Smith: Of course.
Gordon: Nobody in our immediate family. Our father was too young for World War I and too old for
World War II. I might have been drafted except that my draft board let me continue my education.
Smith: So I guess no one in your immediate family was affected? How much older was Hope, your
older sister then you?
Gordon: Two years, but in World War II, they did not draft women, period.
Smith: Oh, yeah, they did not; so she did not serve as a nurse or anything?
Gordon: I had two cousins that went into the U. S. Coastguard SPAR; so there were the WACS, army
women, the WAVES, Navy women and the Spars, Coastguard women.
Smith: SPAR?
18
Gordon: I don’t know. I forget what it stood for.
Both: [Laughs]
Smith: That’s an abbreviation for something, I assume.
Gordon: Maybe an abbreviation for semper gratis, always ready.
Smith: That would make sense then. So, this was in Concord when you were still going to high school?
Then, your parents moved back to Brazil in the fall of 1944?
Gordon: Not till Christmas. I wanted to tell a little bit about my prep school there. In this fall of 1944,
the war had started in 1939; they had drafted a lot of young men into various things. I mean, we were
fighting in the Pacific after 1941 as well as fighting Germany. The result of taking a lot of young men out
of the country was that the colleges’ attendance dropped way down.
Smith: Of course.
Gordon: The effect on the prep schools was the students were too young to be drafted, but some of the
teachers were draft age. So a lot of the teachers went off to war. Some of the college professors who did
not have students in college came to the prep schools to teach. For English, I had a professor from
Amherst teaching me.
Smith: What was the name of your school?
Gordon: Loomis.
Smith: Was that the name of your boarding school?
Gordon: Well, I went there as day student while my parents were at Hartford.
Smith: So, you were a day student and you were commuting. Then, when they moved back to Brazil,
you became a border.
Gordon: Yes. OK. I wanted to tell about picking potatoes. The farmers’ labor was off to war. Potatoes
grew without too much labor until they were ready to be picked. They did have primitive machines
which would dig the potatoes out of the dirt and leave them on top of the dirt. All they needed was
someone to pick up the potatoes and put them in these bags. In our school, there were about 300 students.
19
It was a four year prep school, all boys. Every day one class would go out. The seniors would go one
day, the juniors would go out the next day. So the farmers were having man power every day, picking up
the potatoes. With some of our classes, we would just miss one day of school out of four. Except in my
science class, half the students were seniors and half the students were juniors, but the teacher had to go
out of the field with the sophomores. So one day he would be gone, one day I would be gone and one day
he would be teaching to half of the class. It was only for two or three months.
Smith: This was due to the labor shortage? Did you get paid or was this volunteer work?
Gordon: I don’t think we got paid. This was contributing to the war effort.
Smith: [Laughs.] Is that what everyone thought? That was your contribution?
Gordon: Well, everyone was trying to help. There was also rationing. Butter, Gasoline, and a lot of
other things.
Smith: Yeah, I remember reading about that and my professor mentioned that fact. Do you remember
why that was? What was the reason for butter? I can understand gasoline, but butter? I don’t really
understand the rationing of butter?
Gordon: I hadn’t thought about it much, but this was before oleo was invented; so there wasn’t any
margarine. Butter had to come from the farmers.
Smith: That makes sense then.
Gordon: It comes from cream which comes from milk.
Smith: Which comes from cows.
Gordon: I don’t think there were too many milking machines in those days; so there is a lot of hand
labor involved. The amount of butter was available, but limited. Towards the end of the war, they got
oleo, but the butter industry was able to get Congress to pass a law saying you could not color the oleo
yellow because that was cheating the customer.
Both: [Laughs.]
20
Gordon: So the oleo people would package the oleo and inside was this package was a little yellow pill.
You pressed the pill and broke the pill so the powder got into the oleo. You squeezed it and squeezed
until the color was evenly distributed. That was OK because the customer was not cheated. The customer
could see it was not butter.
Both: [Laughs.]
Smith: At school, was the war a topic of discussion all the time?
Gordon: Quite a bit. I remember particularly the day Roosevelt died. He passed away when I was at
Loomis. It may have been the spring of 1945 when he passed away, but the news went out very rapidly.
Of course we were in prep school and Roosevelt had been President for a long time. As far as we could
remember, he was the only President. He had been elected in 1932 when I was only four years old. It
was quite a shock. Sometimes we would have chapel speakers that would talk about the war. Oh, yes and
one other factor that affected me was there was a Loomis Student before I went there that went off to war
and was killed. His mother was Mrs. Sample and that was their only son.
Smith: Oh my.
Gordon: So, his things were still at Loomis and I got to pick some of his clothes. Nice overcoats.
Smith: They gave the stuff away?
Gordon: I would write her [Mrs. Sample] and tell her. Of course, I didn’t make up for the loss of her
son, but I kept in touch with her. She was in Cleveland, Ohio. Years later, I was still writing to her. If
her son had lived, had a wife, and had children, then she would have had family. She was very lonely.
Smith: Such a sad story.
Gordon: I’m sure that happened lots of places.
Smith: I can imagine.
Gordon: I wanted to tell about Christmas 1944 which was when my parents went back to Brazil. They
had been invited by Chaplain Willard to come to Parris Island. I spent Christmas with them. He was a
21
Chaplain in the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps has a base on Paris Island. He was later sent off to the
Pacific Ocean. He landed with the troops in Guadalcanal.
Smith: Oh, really?
Gordon: He fortunately survived. He wrote a book about his experiences as a Chaplain. He was landing
with the first troops. He wasn’t exactly on the front line, but he was not far from it. He had started a camp
on Cape Cod, Camp Good News. Well, let me finish about Paris Island. We spent Christmas with them.
When our days were over, we went over to Yemassee which was the nearest train station. My sister and I
took a train that went north. She was going back Wellesley and I was going back to Loomis. My parents
with their two [younger] children went south to Miami and I think flew from there back to Brazil.
Smith: So, your two younger siblings went back with them to Brazil?
Gordon: Yes, Hope and I stayed in this country.
Smith: So, you were sixteen at that time.
Gordon: Then, in the summer of 1945, my sister and I applied to Camp Good News, which had been
started by Chaplin Willard, as counselors. We went there both in ‘45 and ‘46. The camp had a rough
time because Chaplin Willard was away [in the Pacific]. His wife sort of kept the thing going. We were
near Camp Edwards which is on Cape Cod. Fighter planes were flying over the camp all the time,
sometimes fairly low.
Smith: Was this like a summer camp? Any normal summer camp where you play games and have fun?
Did that isolate you from the talk of the war? Did everyone still talk about it? Obviously the fighter
planes flying over must have reminded you that it was still going on.
Gordon: Not too much. There were fewer cars around then might have been if cars were plentiful.
Forestdale was. Sandwich was six miles away from our camp and a few times we walked all the way to
Sandwich.
Smith: So in a way it did really isolate you. Were you able to listen to the radio at all?
22
Gordon: We would get some news, but the Camp was pretty much self-contained. One of my campers
and I liked to talk about rockets. He and I actually planned [drew] a plane, pretty childish plane, but let’s
put the control room up front and let’s put the sleeping quarters here and we need a bathroom.
Both: [Laughs.]
Smith: So, you were drawing outlines to planes?
Gordon: Yeah.
Smith: That kind of thing really interested you. I’m not sure what your career was. What did you end up
doing towards the end of the war? You have a doctorate you mentioned.
Gordon: Yeah. Ok. Let me just say, right after the war, I made two predictions. I didn’t exactly get
them printed or anything, but I remember them very clearly. The atom bomb was dropped, Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, I sort of felt if the world can go twenty-five years without an all out nuclear war, we will
have it made. To some extent, that prediction became fulfilled because while it is possible that a terrorist
could still get hold of or make an atom bomb and might cause a lot of damage to one city. It would make
the World Trade Towers just seem like a play thing compared to that. What we were really facing was
hundreds of atom bombs and of course twenty years after World War II, we had thousands of bombs. I
don’t know how familiar you are with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Smith: I know of the situation.
Gordon: Well, to make a long story short, the United States didn’t find out until after the cold war ended
that the Cubans not only had nuclear missiles, but the Cubans had the authority to fire them. The United
States never gave the authority to any other country to fire our atom bombs. There were plenty of
military at that time suggesting we invade Cuba.
Smith: Yeah, I remember. Well, I don’t remember, but I read about it.
Gordon: Anyway, my second prediction was that we will have a man on the moon in ten years. We
were very optimistic on rockets, but in a sense I think that was fulfilled because the United States really
did not get started building that until President Kennedy said we will get a man on the moon by the end of
23
the decade. There was a fifteen year delay there, but it did take ten years to get the Apollo 11 crew on the
moon. So, you want to know what I have done since World War II?
Smith: I was hoping to lead into I guess World War II was on the tail end of 1945, you were about
seventeen and applying to college. I know you attended college; so I was wondering if the fact so many
people were at war affected the application process for college?
Gordon: Not really. I think I had read enough; my mother made sure we had lots of books;
encyclopedia, Book of Knowledge and so forth. I was interested in science when I came to the States.
When I went to Loomis I took a general science course which included Physics and Chemistry. By the
time I finished Loomis, I narrowed in on Physics. So when I went to College, unlike a lot of people, I
was set on a Physics major. I went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut. They had a terrific Professor to
teach freshman Physics. At most colleges, professors rotate teaching freshman Physics because they
don’t like it. A lot of them are more interested in their graduate students and research program. Anyway
in our class, he had about ten actual Physics demonstrations every lecture. He was one of the three best
Physics professors in terms of lecture demonstrations. He looked around in his class and got to know
which the better students were. From later years, I know he went bragging around to other professors,
“You know there is this bright kid here.” So, in my spring semester of my freshman year, another
professor who was doing research in quartz crystals came to me and said, “if you would like to go into
our laboratory and learn to use the instruments, you would not get paid, but if you learn to use the
instruments, we can probably give you a summer job after your freshman year.” That was a marvelous
opportunity! I was on the swimming team the fall of my freshman year, but that was the last of athletics.
[Laughing]
Smith: Yeah, making money is better.
Gordon: I worked the summer after my freshman year. I worked part time during my sophomore year
and all summer after sophomore year. At the beginning of my junior year, the professor comes to me and
24
says, “We have taken all this data. How would you like to put together a theory that would predict what
measurements we get here and there?” My reaction was, “Who? Me?!?”
Both: [Laughs.]
Gordon: It was not until years later that I realized he was asking me to do something that he could not
really do himself.
Smith: Really?
Gordon: He was very good at directing his research effort, but the research was experimental. He would
take quarts crystals and plate them. The net result was I came up with a pretty good theory. I just
happened to have my honors thesis here.
[Dr. Gordon pulls out a book with a number of graphs in it]
Gordon: This is how well the theory which is the curve agreed with the experimental points. This was a
particular crystal with strips. So, that was an unusual opportunity. I don’t know how much you know
about quartz crystals.
Smith: Not very much.
Gordon: They were used in World War II heavily. There were two uses. First, in tanks for radio
communications and we did not have any electronic circuits. Actually, your watch has a little quartz
crystal. The tank would use these little quartz crystals at a definite frequency. They could have a lot of
channels to talk to different people, but you could not use a coil and a condenser because the tank shakes
it up too much. So, they were getting quartz and using it for tanks. The other use is sonar. Sonar was
developed during the war to find submarines. They used these quartz crystals. I got involved in that
research right after the war. One of the textbooks written by Professor Cady which came out in 1946 just
after the war was used a lot to discuss this topic.
[As Dr. Gordon speaks of the text book he pulls it out to and flips through it very quickly for the two of
us to glance at.]
Smith: So in 1945, did you see any celebrations since the war had ended?
25
Gordon: Well, the college football team was getting some GI’s to play football and the first three years
of college we had an undefeated team.
Smith: That’s pretty awesome.
Gordon: The coach got all these offers from these big colleges and in big colleges as long as the coach
has a winning football team, he is good. Once he starts losing, he may lose his job. My Wesleyan coach
decided he would stay at Wesleyan. He would do a good job regardless of what the scores were.
Smith: He would stay.
Gordon: OK. Then, I went to graduate school.
Smith: Was it easier to get into college since attendance was down? Obviously, you had good grades but
was it easier to get into undergraduate schools because of the low attendance.
Gordon: Well, a good prep school has a certain reputation with colleges. My prep school prepared me
for college so well that when I got to college I could relax and study less. I had a lot of time for my other
work. Getting into college was not a problem for me. When I finished college the professor that directed
my work suggested I go to Harvard. He had students who had gone to Harvard and were now teachers at
Harvard. He actually drove me to Harvard to see it. What college professor drives a student to see a
college? Well, there were three professors and there were only three Physics majors. After the visit, the
professor turned to me and says, “Well, you are in!” I said, “What do you mean? We have to wait until
April. They did not tell us that I am in.” My professor said, “But when we said goodbye to him, he
replied, ‘We will see you around.’”
Both: [Laughs.]
Gordon: When the day came for acceptances, I got an acceptance.
Smith: So, you ended up going to grad school at Harvard to study Physics? Wow! Is that where you got
your Ph. D?
Gordon: Yes, at Harvard, I worked on cosmic rays and elementary particles. My faculty advisor had
helped discover the first mu-meson. This is the first elementary particle that is not part of the atom. The
26
atom has protons, neutrons and electrons. I tried to find a new particle but all I did was to perfect an
apparatus which another student had built and I proved what the first graduate student had seen is not a
new particle. Then I was drafted and went to Fort Dietrich for two years. I worked in a Physics
department that worked on taking biological things and disbursing them.
Smith: You mentioned earlier your draft date was postponed until you completed your education.
Gordon: Yes, it was postponed until I got my PhD. With a PhD, I could have gotten a commission as an
officer, but that would mean four years versus two years as a private. I just wanted to get in and get out.
Dietrich had a whole division of scientists and most of them had a master’s degree or doctorate. Most of
us felt that Dietrich was a lot better than fighting in Korea at that time. On the other hand it was the dregs
in regards to civilian life.